Hacker News Reader

The crux of the post seems to be that because Ruby has lambdas, it is an acceptable alternative.

In my experience, being that I'm learning Haskell and coming from a Ruby background, merely having lambdas doesn't qualify for functional status.

Well said. The latest version of PHP is going to have lambdas, and I'm quite certain that it's not a Lisp.

Its lambdas don't even close over lexical state, so I'm not sure why they even exist. Yet another concept the PHP designers don't get, I guess, but feel pressured to add. (See also: PHP's object system.)

Interestingly enough, one of Clojure's selling points is that the basic data structure is not the cons-pair (rather the implementation details of storage are abstracted). It is clearly a lisp, however.

He's not arguing that ruby is a Lisp, just that it gives most of the power of Lisp in a syntax closer to what most programmers are familiar with.

You're right, but he shouldn't have titled it "Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp".